Paco kaj aventuroj

I wrote a lengthy bitching session yesterday on the subject of composition contests and how I feel that they're degrading and repulsive and yet I keep applying to them anyway. But no one really wants to read that, and today I'm thinking about the mountains, so how about I just put up a picture of the Mt Ida hike in RMNP instead? I think that'd be a better situation for all of us.

Peace and best wishes for 2009 to all.

Rounding out

I commend Dan Visconti for his NewMusicBox article yesterday, which took issue with the pervasive and injurious child prodigy myth in music. As another musician with broad interests, Dan's article resonated personally. Like him, I was told not to go into music if there was any other career I could see myself pursuing. Like him, I see music as one of a broad range of social activities that one can participate in on a broad range of levels of commitment, not necessarily to the exclusion of other interests and pursuits. As I commented over at NMBx, the prodigy myth is nothing but a stubborn piece of 19th-century detritus. As long as it hangs on, our young musicians will be ridden with complexes and implicitly encouraged to ignore other interesting corners of life, and music will remain the top-down system it has become in Western society, marred with the awful "professional/amateur" dichotomy that has done so much to suppress creative composition in America. A discussion on this last issue recently sprung up on Sequenza21. It's amazing the degree to which jealous insecurity among musicians has whipped up resentment against "amateurs." Of course, a few sprung to the amateurs' defense, using Ives as their standard-bearer. "Amateur." What a terrible, loaded word that is. Remind me not to use it ever again. This whole debate is just more evidence of the profound neuroses that hound contemporary composers (myself distinctly included). I've written on this before. I would gladly accept a lower per capita level of virtuosity among performers and a similarly lower level of score knowledge among composers in exchange for at least one or two additional significant non-musical interests for each musician. The music world would be a better place to hang out.

Not on the syllabus

In gleeful contradiction of my previous two posts, I am a.) blogging, and b.) quoting. This from the Duckworth book, his conversation with composer/performance artist Laurie Anderson about her formal training in visual art.

"DUCKWORTH: Did you go to Barnard as an art major?

ANDERSON: Art history. They didn't have an art major. I hadn't bothered to check on that. They thought that art was too messy; you should be more theoretical about it.

DUCKWORTH: Didn't that strike you as a dichotomy?

ANDERSON: No, I was glad about that, because the feeling of making art seemed pretty private to me. I did a lot of painting. I had a studio that had nothing to do with school, and I worked there. And I didn't take any art classes. You could take them, but they were so stupid that you didn't want to. But art history was something that fascinated me."

This really makes so much sense. I read an article a few weeks ago in the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy that compared the teaching styles of two legendary composition pedagogues, Nadia Boulanger and Josef Rheinberger. One thread between the two is their basic belief that real capital-C "Composition" cannot be taught, but only its materials, technique, hearing, knowledge of literature. Many current teachers that I've had myself or otherwise heard from agree. This is not to say they aren't teaching us anything--they are just not, strictly speaking, teaching Composition. This is the same principle Anderson is acknowledging from her art school experience: the real doing of art didn't belong in the classroom, but art history did, and she found something to gain in that. Similarly, the curricula of formal composition programs include mostly theory and lit courses. What else is there? Especially for grad students, whose efforts are so wrapped up in the world of school, it's so important to remember that your real creative work is just for you, at first that is, when it is being made. What you learn in school will probably help you, but not necessarily directly, and not necessarily right away.

Don't tell me what I can't do

I'm back in IA until New Year's, so expect minimal activity on here. Apologies, but when I arrived it was 1 degree outside, and we currently have 8-10 inches of snow on the way, so I think most of my energy will be expended trying to stay alive. That and learning the Piano II part to George Crumb's Music for a Summer Evening, which I'll be playing at UT next March. Crumb was one of the first modern composers I ever heard, and when I was a camp counselor in high school I used to play his music in the cabin as a joke. Now I'm spending hours mastering his clusters and inside-the-piano techniques. Karma's a bitch, eh? Seriously, though, what a turn-around. In seven years of music listening, I go from scoffing at Crumb to studying him. A longer essay on this matter should be along sometime next semester.

Speaking of pianistic invention, if you haven't heard La Monte Young's still-developing magnum opus The Well-Tuned Piano, you can download all five discs of the out-of-print recording on this link from Direct Waves. I downloaded the whole thing and then burned it to an MP3 CD, because my hard drive is almost full--another sign that I really, desperately need to clean out my iTunes library, which has slowly grown, without much in the way of shaping/trimming, for almost a full decade. It feels like destroying personal history, though. It's always a trip to sort all 19 days of music on there by date added and go back and remember. Deleting any of those low-quality sound files from 1999 would be like whiting objects out of an old photograph. They were part of that time. They belong there.

Wouldn't it be a great ritual to add to our culture that at some point you have to go back and spend a month, or whatever, listening to everything in your iTunes at a stretch? Like a musical walkabout.

"Favorite Quotations"

"I never said most of the things I said." -- Yogi Berra

Or, as I'd put it, we are more complex than any one of (or even all of) our utterances. We live in a quotation-obsessed culture: fast-moving and info-saturated, we respond best to short bursts of information that are easily and quickly digested. Look at Twitter, Facebook profiles, the Obama campaign (one-word summary = "change"), or, in NewMusicLand, the recent sprouting of groups dedicated to miniatures (1, 2, 3, 4). Or hey, how about blogs?

What's easily missed in all of this is the complexity of the individual. It's so much simpler to catalog everyone and everything we encounter as a flat entity with one important characteristic, like the journalist in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close who gives every notable person he meets a one-word biography. This is also related to the now ubiquitous "fifteen minutes of fame" model. There isn't enough time in culture anymore to know anyone for more than one thing.

If you, like me, enjoy reading about composers, you'll find an antidote to overly simplistic quoting and personality compression in William Duckworth's book Talking Music, a collection of interviews with American experimental composers. Here's the thing about these interviews: they are LONG, not to the point of tedium, but in a manner that makes them relaxed, natural, broad. We get to hear these oft-quoted figures musing freely about their own work and that of their forebears, contradicting themselves, being humans and not static figures held up as examples and used to justify someone or another else's work and preferences. (I do this all the time using quotations, as any reader of my blog could tell you.)

I've only read the first handful, but I have so far found great evidence for the clearing up of certain pervasive myths. John Cage was NOT, for one, a freewheeling, anything-goes anarchist who eschewed objective judgments of music. Yes, he has been quoted as saying "Imagine, a sound being better [than another]"--but here, he unreservedly rips into the whole field of music criticism as well as most performances and recordings of his music, describing them variously and misunderstood, bad, and even "stupid." Cage also describes himself as an "elitist": "I didn't study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg...I've always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company."

Of course, when Duckworth points out that he, Cage is now the president of the company, Cage responds, "I have tried to indicate that there is no company." The closing lines of the interview say a great deal: "I'm not bothered by contradictions. Inconsistency, as we know from Emerson, is not a bad thing."

Flipping forward, you'll find a nice, long interview with Milton Babbitt, a man who certainly deserves a nice, long interview simply by virtue of the respect-your-elders principle. You might not realize, given the way he is popularly portrayed and certainly the way he is introduced to undergraduates, that Babbitt is NOT an ideologue. I was aware of this only because I have friends and teachers who studied with him and they told me. Like everyone else in my generation, I was first introduced to Babbitt in a sophomore music history class through the article which, much to his chagrin, was published as "Who Cares if You Listen?" Incidentally, if you haven't reread that old favorite since sophomore year, you should go back and do so; you'll likely discover that it's full of wit and sarcasm that, like me, you missed the first time, probably because your professor and/or your textbook were doing what I described above and presenting Babbitt as a one-dimensional version of Babbitt because that's more pedagogically pragmatic.

Truth is, as it turns, out, he is NOT a zealot for serialism or anything else. One thing he IS, on the other hand, is a brilliant guy with an acute, engaging manner in writing and in conversation. He loves good beer and has an encyclopedic knowledge of popular songs and baseball statistics. The interview was a pleasure to read. There's another good one with Frank Oteri at NewMusicBox. If you've received the same slanted version of this composer in the past that I have, read one or two of these interviews. I certainly hear his music differently as a result.

In all cases, reading these personal, fleshed out discussions has helped me to arrive at a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the composers therein. It's easy to find conflicting interpretations of these people, and different versions of Cage and Babbitt specifically, due to their plentiful writings, are easily supported with "textual evidence" on the order of quotations. But we must remember that people are not texts. It's a frequent and perhaps unavoidable sin in the humanities to use them as such. But people are not internally consistent, nor should they be. The world would be a lot more boring.

Reasonable doubt

As part of my continuing discussion of formal composition study and whether or not it's an insidious and dishonest racket, I am obliged to report that the newest Grawemeyer Award winner, Australian composer and violist Brett Dean, has never had a composition lesson. (See S21 interview.)

Hmm.

I guess that is what it is.

"For those of you who don't know, I am also a composer. I write old-fashioned music which does not require an explanation. I taught myself how to do it by going to the library and listening to records."
--Frank Zappa

UPDATE: For the record, I harbor no resentment for my education. I think I've been able to dodge most of the imperatives thrown at me that I didn't find personally resonant and/or advantageous, and at best, I think my education has basically been an extended version of "going to the library and listening to records"--and then talking about them with people, some of whom know a lot more stuff about the records than I do.

Concert Tuesday

As usual, I will plug the UT New Music Ensemble's concert Tuesday night. Austinites, it's in Bates at 8pm. Non-Austinites, you can hear the concert via live webcast. The program includes UT student Dries Berghman's Archetypes, Jacob Druckman's Come Round, and our own Yevgeniy Sharlat's Concertino for Viola and Chamber Orchestra.